'The Following' review: These teacher's pets are monsters

Kevin Bacon stars in Fox's "The Following," in which he plays a weak and weary former FBI agent who squares off against an Edgar Allan Poe-worshipping serial killer.

(Photo by Fox )

In brief: Kevin Bacon headlines his first TV series in "The Following," a grim, graphic thriller in which he plays Ryan Hardy, a former FBI agent who put away a Poe-obssessed serial killer at great cost to his physical and mental health. He's recalled to duty when the killer, Joe Carroll (James Purefoy), escapes, and simultaneously unleashes the coven of killers he's secretly cultivated via the Internet. Watch it with some fava beans and a nice Chianti. It premieres on Fox tonight at 9 p.m.

First impressions: Carroll was failed novelist but beloved literature professor at a Virginia university when Hardy unmasked him as the butcher of more than a dozen coeds. After sending him to prison, Hardy briefly romanced Carroll's ex-wife, Claire Matthews (Natalie Zea). Both insults have led Carroll to cast Hardy as the flawed hero of his living novel: a mosaic of splattery killings from coast to coast, courtesy of Carroll's bloodthirsty acolytes, some of whom have been embedded in the lives of his intended victims.

James Purefoy plays Joe Carroll, a former professor and imprisoned serial killer who orchestrates a nationwide killing spree by his band of followers.

Sounds like a pretty decent big-screen thriller, perhaps starring, oh, Kevin Bacon? Creator Kevin Williamson, who turned the teen horror genre on its head with the "Scream" franchise, apparently thinks he can stretch out this premise over a season and beyond, but I'm not convinced. The show quickly becomes dense with flashbacks revealing previous murders (and murderous meet-cutes), but there's a lot of by-the-book procedural, too, with Hardy racing to rescue one damsel or another.

What's not by the book? The gore. It's not quite "Se7en"-level of splatter, but you'll flinch more than you're accustomed to on a Monday night (unless you're a "Dancing with the Stars" fan, that is.) Much of it is rather gratuitous, but there are a few shocking moments that serve the plot by showing the lengths to which Carroll's followers will go to prove their allegiance. And the scares are pretty effective.

Bacon convinces as the functional wreck, devastated by his failure to catch Carroll before he racked up his 14 bodies, but I don't buy Purefoy as the cooly charismatic Hannibal Lecter figure who woos and manipulates a stable of acolytes from behind his prison bars. He comes off as merely smarmy, and his Poe disquisitions are shallow. In fact, the Poe framework is fairly weak, giving the show a literary gloss but little else.

The supporting cast is strong, including Annie Parrise ("Law and Order"'s Alexandra Borgia) as a sharp-eyed FBI cult specialist and Shawn Ashmore (Iceman of "X Men") as an eager-beaver young agent who seems to idolize Hardy, although the body count for the white hats mounts pretty fast.

Putting aside how Carroll managed to propagate his savage tribe from behind bars (Virginia may have the death penalty, but it apparently has a very lenient visitation policy), the show does get more fun — if a show that routinely features eye-gougings can be classified as fun — when the camera shifts to Carroll's followers.

They're a mixed bag of sociopaths, loners and dim bulbs, and we see them as they first encounter Carroll and find kindred spirits in one another. The dynamics of one grouping in particular are entertaining: think "Jules et Jim" starring the Manson Family. Seriously. After the pilot, it's not hard to figure out which of the seemingly-innocuous characters are Carroll's plants, but watching the followers bond and bicker like a demented "Brady Bunch" is part of the show's cringe-y, creepy charm.

Grade: B

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